The Blog

The 9 Keys to Good Small Business Website Development

We get a lot of questions from business owners about what makes a good small business website. Development of a small business website is a pretty important thing to pay attention to since these days your website pretty much rests at the center of any good modern day marketing effort.

Every website is a little bit different. However, I can give you 9 design elements that will help you succeed.

1. WordPress Integration

WordPress is so SEO and user friendly that it barely makes sense not to use it. There are other content management platforms, but many of them are needlessly complicated and few are as easy to customize.

Ease of use and customization are important. Frankly, you’re already pressed for time. There’s no good reason to create a website that’s going to be a headache for you to update.

If you’re doing it yourself, most hosting services will let you install WordPress simply by clicking the appropriate link.

2. A Custom, Branded Theme

Free themes just aren’t going to cut it. You want a clean, attractive, personalized WordPrss theme that helps you communicate your business brand.

Each blog post should contain at least 250 words of relevant, readable, useful information that’s interesting to your customers. Think about what your customers ask you all the time – that stuff is a goldmine for potential blog post topics.

Photos and videos are a big plus whenever and wherever appropriate.

6. Social Sharing Buttons

Google is using all sorts of social indicators to determine how and where to rank content. That means you need to encourage your visitors to share your content.

You can do this by adding share buttons to your site. They don’t have to display the share count if you don’t want them to – there are plenty of buttons that are just sharing icons.

7. Local Keywords Whenever Appropriate

If you do business in a specific place (and most small businesses do) then you need to take every appropriate opportunity to work the names of that place into your website. This will help you draw visitors who are actually equipped to do business with you.

8. A Contact Form

A contact form will let you reach out to people who visit your website. It builds the bridge between passive readers and new customers.

Make sure the address matches the one in Google+ Local exactly. That way you will naturally build citations with each and every web page you create, which will help you rank higher in local search results.

Get Help if You’re Overwhelmed

Reading this list might have given you an idea of just how much goes into professional internet marketing. If you’re still not sure what to do, we can help.